Stephen Shankland

Government subsidies and pandemic-era telecommuting have quietly fueled the growth of broadband fiber networks, propelling the fast connection technology from an exotic, expensive technology niche to the mainstream. In the US, the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund and Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment programs encouraged internet service providers to bring higher-speed access to places that previously wouldn't have been profitable to serve. Government support also has helped improve broadband in Sweden, Lithuania, Italy and other European nations.

Google's Chrome team, advancing its web privacy effort, later in 2020 will begin testing the "privacy sandbox" proposals it unveiled in 2019. The Chrome tests are part of an effort to make it harder for publishers, advertisers and data brokers to harvest your personal data without your permission and to track you online. Other browsers, including Apple's Safari, Brave Software's Brave, Mozilla's Firefox and Microsoft's new Chromium-based Edge, have pushed steadily to cut tracking for the last few years.

Google's Chrome team proposed a "privacy sandbox" that's designed to give us the best of both worlds: ads that publishers can target toward our interests but that don't infringe our privacy. It's a major development in an area where Chrome, the dominant browser, has lagged competitors. Browsers already include security sandboxes, restrictions designed to confine malware and limit its possible damage.

A Q&A with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Internet.

Twenty-five years ago, on March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposed "a universal linked information system" to help itinerant academics from across the globe run a complicated particle accelerator. Boy, did the World Wide Web ever exceed those initial expectations. For Berners-Lee, the job is nowhere near done. His to-do list includes reining in governmental spying, ensuring personal privacy, getting people to look beyond their own narrow cultural interests, and reshaping the Web into a better foundation for software instead of just documents. Berners-Lee spoke about what he sees as the Web's next priorities.